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The truth about Wendi Deng

Wendi Deng came from smalltown China to woo the most influential men in the world and establish herself as a dynamic and ruthless businesswoman. But are the rumours about Putin true? And does she have a secret political agenda? David Jenkins talks to those who know…

Hungry boxers make the best boxers. And the best boxers come from the toughest backgrounds. Which helps explain the spectacular right hook that Wendi Deng delivered to the 'comedian' who tried to thrust a foam-filled pie into Rupert Murdoch's face when Wendi's then husband appeared before a House of Commons Select Committee investigating phone hacking in 2011.

Wendi Deng was born on 8 December 1968 in mainland China - in Xuzhou, a place she calls 'a funny little town in the countryside'. She grew up 'very poor. We didn't have hot water.' One of four children, she was, she later said, so deprived that a dream of hers was one day to eat meat regularly.

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Quite a step, then, to marrying Rupert Murdoch on his yacht in New York Harbour when she was 30 and he was 68; to writing memos to herself rhapsodising about Tony Blair's allure - 'He has such good body and he has really really good legs. Butt. Pierce blue eyes which I love. Love his eyes... And what else and what else and what else'; to divorcing Murdoch and to tales of encounters in the Beverly Hills Hotel with Eric Schmidt, then CEO of Google, and of optimistic encounters with Tim Cook, the gay (but not then out) CEO of Apple; to holidaying with Roman Abramovich and Dasha Zhukova, a co-investor with Wendi in Artsy, a potentially world-disrupting art website; to tight, tight friendships with such fellow Dragon Empresses as Anna Wintour, Diane von Furstenberg, Pearl Lam and Nicole Kidman; to - should the stories be true, and please, please, please let them be true - a dalliance with Vladimir Putin, a tale I first head from a source invited to Jerry Hall's Fleet Street wedding. Others were told at Liberty Ross's wedding to Jimmy lovine, on Valentine's Day - and those with their ears to the ground have been hearing the rumours since last summer.

And why shouldn't Putin gaze rapturously into the dark pools of Wendi's eyes? As one denizen of the art world put it to me, 'She's super-super-smart, very quick, with great allure and great charm. Which is a very potent mix.'

Still, what a long, strange trip it's been. Deng was originally named Deng Wen Ge, which means 'Cultural Revolution' - not an unusual name at the time, when loyalty to Mao Zedong's policies was crucial. Her parents were, in fact, relatively well off: both were engineers, and her father managed the local engineering works. Wendi, driven on by her parents, studied ferociously and, according to a childhood friend, slept only three hours a night - good practice for her later New York partying. Luck came her way. Her father became a factory manager in Guangzhou, China's third largest city after Beijing and Shanghai. There, the 16-year-old Wen Ge enrolled in medical college, though she concentrated on improving her English. Proficiency in English was important: Mark Seal, writing a thorough account of Deng's odyssey in Vanity Fair, quotes her as having said: 'In China, at that time, the idea of getting out and going to America was the stuff of dreams.'

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She turned that dream into reality in 1987, when she met Jake and Joyce Cherry, an American couple who'd gone to Guangzhou. Jake, then 50, was helping build a factory; his wife, then 42, started tutoring Wendi in English, then left for California to put their children into school. Her husband rang: Wendi wanted to come to the USA to study. The Cherrys helped her with her student-visa application and put her up when she arrived in Los Angeles in February 1988 - Wendi shared a bunk bed and a bedroom with their five-year-old daughter. Wendi worked in a Chinese restaurant, as an Avon salesperson and at an accounting firm. But all was not well: Mrs Cherry found vampish pictures of Wendi, taken by her husband in his Guangzhou hotel; Jake and Wendi stayed out late together; Joyce decided the couple were having an affair and told Wendi to leave. Jake in turn left soon after, and the pair married in 1990 - all of which the pre-Murdoch Wall Street Journal reported. (There's a tale that Murdoch said he understood the WSJ 's reasons for writing the story, but did they have to put in the bit about the bunk beds?)

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Soon, though, Deng started hanging out with a man called David Wolf, who was in his mid-20s and even taller than her - she's five-foot-10. She and Jake divorced two years and seven months after marrying, 'seven months longer than required for Wendi to obtain a green card allowing her to live and work in the US', as the WSJ put it. For his part, Jake Cherry told the WSJ: 'She told me I was a father concept to her, but it would never be anything else. I loved that girl.' He's not the first man to have regretted a midlife crisis.

For Deng, though, life was onward and upward. At Cal State, where she was studying, she and three other students were regarded as 'the most talented group ever to pass through the school's economics department'. One professor endorsed Wendi's application for a place at Yale's business school by writing that she was a 'super student, very focused'. She got a place - and an MBA. Her English was fluent, if accented. It's less so now, as her YouTube appearances show - though one acquaintance calls it 'extreme Chinese - a duchess strangulated with her pearl necklace'. Note also her tactility, the way she unselfconsciously puts her hand on a co-interviewee's forearm, and her wit, making jokes about a doting Murdoch's inability to learn Mandarin.

But that's to get ahead of the story. While doing her MBA, Wendi met the COO of Star TV, the Hong Kong- based flagship of Murdoch's push into Asia. Yale demanded a student do an internship: Wendi, who had interpreted for Chinese businessmen in the USA, got a gig at Star.

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So far, so dynamic, so ruthless and so effective. And so assertive: she'd boldly introduce herself to Star executives; even more boldly, she stood up at a staff meeting addressed by Murdoch in 1997 and asked, 'Why is your business strategy in China so bad?' She declared herself unsatisfied with his response. 'She made an impression.' All of which sits oddly with other recollections offered by colleagues. 'She was remarkable for not being remarkable,' one told me, 'though I like her - she's very personable. But she had no USP: there were far prettier and far more ambitious Chinese girls everywhere, in quite high-powered positions.' And she 'certainly wasn't the Killer Goddess she became with Rupert later', said another Hong Konger. She wasn't, a third added, at all glamorous; she wore 'terrible, broken-down shoes'. She was an unsophisticated mainlander among sophisticated Hong Kong-raised Chinese. Indeed, says a close observer, 'When she hooked up with Rupert, everyone reeled backwards - very much so.'

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But hook up she had, on a business trip to Beijing. Murdoch was smitten and she... well, as she told Chinese TV: 'He was pondering because at that time his marriage was in trouble. They began to separate. He wanted to be with me - and I said no.'

Treat 'em mean, keep 'em keen. It worked. According to Wendi, Murdoch said, 'Don't worry. I will marry you.' Which he did, discarding Anna, his wife of 32 years. His four grown-up children were appalled. But a mere 17 days after his divorce was formalised, Rupert wed a barefoot Wendi on board his boat, Morning Glory. He told the 82 guests that 'he loved her and would take care of her, for ever and ever.' Charlotte Church sang.

Murdoch look after Wendi for ever and ever? In a trice, she took control, shifting the hitherto unfashionable Murdoch into groovy turtlenecks, moving the uptown guy to SoHo in downtown Manhattan, getting him pumping iron and swallowing fruit and soy-protein drinks. She overshared her husband's use of Viagra- 'but he doesn't really need it' - and the couple met the challenge of Murdoch's prostate cancer by having his sperm frozen. They had two daughters: Grace, born in 2001, and Chloe, born in 2003. She mothered them, as she did Murdoch. When one acquaintance went for a drink at the Murdochs', Wendi was out of the room, tucking up the children. When she came back, she wiped Murdoch's mouth.

Wendi flew high. When the children were baptised in the River Jordan in 2010, their godparents included Tony Blair, Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman, all dressed in white for an occasion at which they were guests of Queen Rania - as was Ivanka Trump, whose product launches Wendi has attended. Pictures of the ceremony appeared in Hello! - but none included Blair. It was Fiona Golfar, writing for British Vogue, who revealed that Blair had indeed been there and was indeed a godparent - which he'd omitted to tell the world. Wendi formed friendships with powerful women like Diane von Furstenberg and self-help author Kathy Freston; Bono, David Geffen, Arianna Huffington, Amy Tan and Amy 'The Tiger Mom' Chua were also friends. She hung out with what she described as 'the Google guys', Larry Page and Sergey Brin - just as she did with Chris DeWolfe, the founder of MySpace, which Murdoch bought for £400m in 2005 and sold for £25m in 2011. She and DeWolfe were the subject of persistent rumours that business was leaching into pleasure - DeWolfe has denied them.

Deng was plugged right in: she helped Murdoch with the purchase of the Wall Street Journal; she made connections with the highest echelons of the Chinese power pyramid; she restored a vast house in Beijing and revamped an enormous triplex on Fifth Avenue that had previously been owned by Laurance Rockefeller - a house she later got in the divorce. Anna Wintour found her just the right clothes; she wore Prada, Lanvin sandals, whatever was the season's fashion. She produced a movie, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, set in 19th-century China. When, at the last minute, one of the leading actresses dropped out of the film, Deng was a blur of energy. 'She hit the phones,' Wayne Wang, the director, told British Vogue. 'For her, "no" is not an option.' She swiftly signed up Li Bingbing, who - Wendi-like - studied nightly during the shoot to improve her English. 'She learnt on the job,' a smiling Wendi told a TV interviewer, touching Bingbing fondly on the sleeve.

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To watch Deng on YouTube is to see an attractive, self-confident and witty woman, a woman who works hard and plays hard; a woman you wouldn't want to cross and with whom it would be fun to party. And party she did: out at the Box until 6am; flying back by helicopter from the Hamptons one night with Rupert, one observer recalls, she told him to go home - she was heading out. It was almost the tone of the Private Eye parody of the Murdochs' marriage come to life: 'Strewth, Wendi,' the Eye's Dirty Digger says, 'my heart is bursting with pride.' At which Wendi screeches, 'NO HEALT BULST YET, ORD MAN! YOU SAVE COMPANY FIRST!'

The point being that by now Murdoch was in his 80s and Wendi a frolicsome 40-odd-year-old. She'd fought anger from Murdoch's ex-wife, mother and grown-up children; she'd got an equal slice of the News Corp cash pie for her two girls. And she was increasingly going her own way in business terms - she, Dasha Zhukova, Larry Gagosian, Eric Schmidt and Jack Dorsey of Twitter were early investors in Artsy. Deng's not just there as a pretty face; an art-world habitué tells me that 'she's very involved. The art world is still all about contacts and she excels at that. One phone call and it's done. Wendi can open so many doors - especially with the growing importance of Asia.' She is, he adds, 'a rainmaker' - though one mainland Chinese source says 'it's not that Wendi's fallen from grace, but she has lost some respect with the Chinese. She still has a great range of contacts and is obviously very well off, but people gave her more respect when she was married.' (The same source adds that Deng's looks are not the sort that Chinese men find particularly attractive.)

But she's certainly in the art-scene and New York society spotlight. You wouldn't have bet on that in the fallout from the Blair/divorce debacle. Vanity Fair reported that it was Rupert's eldest son, Lachlan, who suggested Wendi be kept tabs on; others that it was Elisabeth Murdoch who proposed this. But in 2013, Murdoch quizzed staff at his California ranch and asked them to tell him the truth about her meetings there with Blair - who, it must be noted, has categorically denied an affair, though other meetings have been alleged at the Carlyle Hotel in New York and in Murdoch's St James's Place apartment in London. But Blair's frequent calls to Murdoch have gone unanswered ever since the divorce suit was filed, in 2013. Deng knew nothing of the lightning strike to come; some say that when she arrived at her daughters' school to pick the girls up, a fellow mother said that she was sorry to hear the news. 'What news?' said Deng. And that was that. The queen is dead - long live Jerry Hall.

Except that Deng hasn't faded into the background, as Murdoch's two previous wives did. She's out there, attending galas for 'Powerful Women', being a co-chair at last year's Chinese-themed Met Gala. She was there this year too, sitting with Wintour and Sir Jonathan Ive at the preview of the tech-themed event - and later wearing a laser-cut lace and embroidery Christopher Kane dress that she called 'really beautiful' to the ball itself. Diane von Furstenberg remains a close friend, as does Wintour - who, it's said, has suggested that Deng steer clear of the press for the time being. Those who know her well would tell me only how much they 'admire' Wendi and 'love' her, but would say nothing either on or off the record without her permission. And an approach to Wendi via an intimate met with the response that 'Wendi at present does not want any press coverage'.

Up to a point, Lord Copper. For just as Rupert Murdoch married Jerry Hall last March, up popped Wendi, populating the front row at Paris Fashion Week, sitting next to Wintour at Fendi and telling the New York Times that 'I don't usually come to Paris for Fashion Week but I decided to this weekend. It's been such fun.' Also fun, no doubt, was linking arms in Paris with 30-year-old Charlie Siem, an Old Etonian classical violinist who's modelled for Dunhill and Hugo Boss. Arm candy, to be sure, and a reminder that she too could deal with younger models - Hall is 60 to Murdoch's 85 - but...

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Well, it's nothing compared to Putin, about which relationship no one has commented officially. Still, it wouldn't surprise one old China hand. Bar poor Jake Cherry, she says, Wendi's done nothing as a calculated career move; she's done what she's done because she wanted to. 'Perhaps she's a good-time girl at heart.' Or maybe, says someone who's been privy to the Putin gossip for a long time, she's 'the politicians' equivalent of Mick Jagger - the person all those powerful people think they've got to be with'. Mick; Jerry; Murdoch; Wendi - there's a pleasing symmetry to it all.

But what would be best of all would be for Wendi - as waggish conspiracy theorists have long mooted - to turn out to have been a 'sleeper' for the Chinese Communist Party all along, moving ever closer to the levers of power: Cherry, Murdoch, Blair, Putin and then... Well, The Donald has declared that he could have 'made' Diana, Princess of Wales, if he'd been given the time; and Hillary must long to get her own back on Bill. World domination beckons. This one could run and run.